Sometimes it’s not really much more complicated than this:
Governance is politics in the same room
If you find yourself whispering in the corner “it’s so political around here” you should all get in the same room.
Just clearing out some old presentations:
Update: moved from iWork link to Slideshare (because iWork is being turned off for some reason)
Matthew has invited you to view a document they’ve shared on iWork.com. To see it, click View Document.
It’s disturbs me a little that everything in the Apple ecosystem, from App Stores, to App icons on iPhone home screens and on Launcher for Mac, to application specific file systems, is stepping backwards from a document centric view of computing back to an application centric view. The iCloud experience appears to confirm this direction. I’m not sure what I think about this.
iCloud isn’t just an Apple branded Dropbox. The difference between iCloud and Dropbox based sync is application versus document-centricity. Earlier in the history of computing there was a push away from application based computing, where the focus was on which application you were using to the idea of using multiple micro applications to edit documents. Microsoft’s object linking and embedded was an example of this. The old Microsoft Binder was in a way also a step towards this idea. Most explicitly, the Apple lead consortium developing the OpenDoc initiate had this idea at its core.
All of these products are now dead. More recently the dream of document-centric computing itself has died. Perhaps to be replaced by synchronisation and mobility.
The difference between Dropbox and iCloud synchronization is that Dropbox is theoretically just a file system. Multiple applications could easily edit the same files – as long as they pointed to the same file in Dropbox. This was also true across platforms. If you have a document that you edit on your iPad and sync with Dropbox you can edit that same file, using a different application, on your PC.
The iCloud experience is completely different. The only way to edit a document across platforms or devices is to use a version of the application for each device. Not a compatible application. Not a micro application that uses the same file format. But the equivalent application from the same vendor. Usually this additional application is purchased at an additional cost.
This is the most interesting part of the iOS5 experience. Not because it’s any easier than Dropbox based synchronization but because it may actually make me change the desktop application that I use purely based on iCloud support. It may also make me buy one application purely for synchronisation while I might use another for specific editing on a particular platform (after manually “syncing” on the platform).
http://howtosavetheworld.ca/2009/09/14/what-you-can-do-a-framework-for-personal-action-version-0-9/
I think it’s time I made clear something I’ve honestly believed for a long time.
I think capitalism is a really good system. I think “freedom” is the only moral political system. I think the Austrian Economists at www.Mises.org are right.
But I think capitalism and corporatism are different.
As one of my favorite intellectuals I’ve never met (Peter Klein) would probably agree, it’s all about entrepreneurship.
I think the anti-capitalism interpretations of Naomi Klein’s work, and the anti-capitalist interpretations of the whole “occupy Wall Street” movement, are flawed.
And finally – and this is the point of this post – I believe that all corporations exist for only four reasons:
1. To provide a mechanism for fascinating and productive individuals who are too scared to start their own business to be “successful”
2. To provide a mechanism for economically, socially, or future-trendy savvy people to be successful through investment and non-participatory involvement
3. To allow people like me, who are fascinated by the way organisations work, to make them better. Just for our own personal satisfaction.
4. To either make individuals happier by the products and services they provide – or to fail
This is what I believe. It’s also why I think Alan Joyce is cool.
Vision, original or second hand, is obvious in retrospect…
Happy birthday iPod.
What a difference a decade makes:
”It’s a nice feature for Macintosh users,” said P. J. McNealy, a senior analyst for Gartner G2, an e-commerce research group. ”But to the rest of the Windows world, it doesn’t make any difference.”
Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, disputed the concern that the market was limited, and said the company might have trouble meeting holiday demand. He predicted that the improvement in technology he said the iPod represented would inspire consumers to buy Macintosh computers so they could use an iPod.
(Via Mises Economics Blog)
This thought has kept occurring over the last few years:
“Information management is management”
This is true in a number of ways:
- traditional styles of management maintain their power by withholding information
- market-based management increases transparency through information
- there is now to much information – and managing it sometimes feels like the whole deal
- market-based management ensures integration of feedback – usually in the form of information
- market-based management ensures the manipulation of the right information has appropriate impact on the performance of the organisation (i.e. manage the information and you manage the organisation)
- The Hayek “The Use of Knowledge in Society” sense
Nice:
If everything is a service, why should management be assigned any priority over anything else?
Short answer: no valid reason at all – from a services-perspective, anyway. It’s just another service, or set of services.
The only feasible reason why management might be assigned arbitrary priority over other services is from left-over delusions about ‘rights of control’. For the most part, these delusions arise from an unfortunate coincidence of functions within the ‘management-services’:
services for strategic-assessment – potentially giving the delusion that ‘knowing more about big-picture’ inherently means ‘responsibility to tell others what to do’
services for coordination of resource-allocation – potentially giving the delusion of authority over others via ‘right to withhold’, in turn arising from delusions about the (dys)functional role of purported ‘rights of possession’ within the broader society, and hence within an organisation’s economic model.
In short, architecturally speaking, this is not a defensible reason for priority. Every service is ‘just another service’ that is required for enterprise viability: hence no service can be said to have inherent priority over any other.
read it all here:
http://weblog.tetradian.com/2011/09/26/rethinking-architecture-of-mgmt/
This is probably a sound assessment of risk and is refreshingly aware of transparency requirements:
“We are only one FOI [Freedom of Information] request away from having to hand it over anyway,” he said. “So it’s not something we have been focusing on.”
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/271292,wa-parliament-ipad-trial-exposes-it-headaches.aspx
After years and years of moving responsibilities for IT budgets to “the business” new is it really a surprise that CIOs now start reporting to CFOs? And isn’t it a conflict of interest for the CFO to claim budget from another group?
http://www.itp.net/585481-cios-losing-control-of-budgets-to-cfos